Xubuntu conquered

[altivo]

In spite of efforts by the Ubuntu team to confuscate and hide stuff, I managed to get what I wanted working. They have castrated gdm so I installed kdm instead. It seems to have escaped the knife so far. Further tweaking in the Xaccess and xdmcp configurations got most of what I need working.

Got home from dinner out with Gary to find that Sarah had chewed a hole in her dressing and was licking at the stitches. I couldn't tell if she had actually popped any of them or not, but fortunately I had the right stuff (vetwrap, non-stick gauze, tape) to recover and rewrap it. Now she'll have to go back to the clinic tomorrow to have it looked at, though possibly the techs can take care of it. Tomorrow is my all day commitment to demo spinning and weaving over in Lake County, which doesn't help. Fortunately I don't have to be there until 10.

I see storm clouds on the horizon at work, much as I had feared. There's a battle coming over Windows ("it's what people are used to") and Linux. I'm going to tell the new boss that I don't do Windows. Period. If she wants to dump all my work and go back to Windows (at twice what Linux is costing us) then she'll have to get someone else to do it. In a way, it would be a relief to get rid of the responsibility for all this BS anyway. Unfortunately this has strong echoes of what happened before I left the college environment eight years ago.

Comments

[schnee]

Got home from dinner out with Gary to find that Sarah had chewed a hole in her dressing and was licking at the stitches.

No cone of shame for her?

[altivo]

Not yet. So far we've managed to keep her from doing too much damage to the bandage but the cone is sitting there waiting if we have to use it. She goes back for another inspection and rebandaging this morning.

[schnee]

*noddles* I hope she won't need it.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Yikes. I guess if you want to avoid Windows, the most convincing display may be to convince the boss to run a pilot on just a couple of workstations, just so she can see the "costs of running Windows" in an environment like that.

My experience has been (from having worked in a school district which was a Windows shop) that, after all the licenses for XP and anti-malware and antivirus products have been purchased, then you wind up practically needing to upgrade to rather good hardware so the machines are faster than molasses. Or, the library could go the route of using Windows 7...after likely upgrading the workstation hardware.

Older eMacs might be a better choice than Windows. The long and short of it, and I know I'm preaching to the choir here, is that Linux runs well on old commodity hardware, and it's difficult for patrons to screw-up. OS X is the same way. Windows computers just can't cut it in an environment where the users are malicious or even simply incompetent. Well, Deep Freeze and similar products that make the computer work like an Etch-a-Sketch (shake it between each user for a blank slate!) are an answer, but why would anyone want to go there?

[altivo]

We've already been down that road, DeepFreeze and WinSelect and more. The whole justification that we built for switching to Linux was the tremendous cost savings and simpler administration.

With any luck, the new boss will find her backbone soon and realize that not only do we not have to just give the users absolutely anything they want, we can't do it.

The cost of antivirus licensing alone was running nearly two grand a year. Add in the other products necessary to keep Windows under control and somewhat secure, and we could have bought half a dozen new workstations a year just for the software renewal costs. Even then, we had kids who had figured out how to get around WinSelect and bring up chat sites on the public catalog terminals. I was reduced to blocking individual sites at the firewall, which is just playing "whack a mole."

If she insists on Windows on public workstations, someone else will have to do it. I'm just not going back there.